…overprogrammed children engineered to the specifications of college admissions offices no longer experience the risks and challenges that breed maturity… Eric Posner

Anyone who has been paying attention will not be surprised to discover that university students and graduates lack an essential ingredient of adulthood: adulthood!

It should not be controversial to believe that growing up involves becoming stronger, becoming better able to withstand whatever slings and arrows life throws at us and to pursue our goals even against difficult challenges. Surely the college years can and should play an important role in that growing-up process.

And yet, too often colleges treat their students like hatchlings not yet ready to leave the nest, as opposed to preparing and encouraging them to fly…

… whose responsibility is it to address this and other aspects of campus culture that stand in the way of students developing the kind of resilience and strength that they need in life? __ Judith Shapiro

Modern children are coddled all the way through university, and beyond. Sheltered far from the adult world of responsibility and hard knocks, many remain unprepared for reality their entire lives.

Why are modern university students and graduates so eager to wear those baby-suits?

Unprepared for Life

When

Between the infantilizing of campus culture and the growing global harshness, something has to give and—hint, hint—it won’t be the real world. The worst thing about the current climate of PC stupidity and mandatory cocooning on campus isn’t the ugly repression it entails. The destruction of free speech and free debate in the institutions that ought to be the citadels of intellectual liberty is a terrible thing and a horrible betrayal of everything universities are supposed to be about. But there is yet a worse consequence: the catastrophic dumbing down and weakening of a younger generation that is becoming too fragile and precious to exist in the current world—much less to fight the real evils and dangers that are growing. __ Stop Coddling the Kids

There seems to be a difference between how leftist students experience college and how non-leftists experience it.

I would not get fired for pissing off a Republican, so long as I did so respectfully, and so long as it happened in the course of legitimate classroom instruction.

The same cannot be said of liberal students. All it takes is one slip—not even an outright challenging of their beliefs, but even momentarily exposing them to any uncomfortable thought or imagery—and that’s it, your classroom is triggering, you are insensitive, kids are bringing mattresses to your office hours and there’s a twitter petition out demanding you chop off your hand in repentance.
__ The Paranoid Professor

Every libertarian or conservative university student has been forced to examine their personal axioms and the mechanics of their personal philosophy. Such self-questioning is a useful part of the university experience — and one that leftist students often successfully avoid altogether. And so they never challenge themselves, never validate themselves, never grow up.

1) It’s not entirely clear how prevalent this phenomenon is. The demand for insulating students from potentially upsetting ideas does, for the moment, appears to come from a vocal minority and does not appear to have widespread support. Yet isn’t that always how these sorts of things start? And isn’t it well established that a vocal and highly motivated minority interest group can have an outsized influence on institutional policies?

2) Efforts to insulate students from challenging and even potentially offensive ideas cuts them off from the world and compromises much of the value of a traditional “liberal” education. It’s like some want to turn universities into the secular equivalents of Ave Maria Town.

3) One of the benefits of having been right-of-center in college was that my political and philosophical views were constantly challenged. There was no “safe space” — and I was better for it. I often felt that I received a better education than many of my peers precisely because I was not able to hold unchallenged assumptions or adopt unquestioned premises. __ Jonathan Adler in WaPo

Universities are releasing a flood of coddled, pampered “baby graduates” into an ever more dangerous world. These entitled incompetents, indignant that the real world fails to appreciate how special they are, proceeds to join movements for those with nothing important to do, such as “Occupy”, community activism, or a range of faux environmental movements — some of them partially supported by the Eurasian dictatorships.

Many of these little darlings end up in government, media, and journalism, where they help to propagate the distorted viewpoints of the world which shaped their own upbringings and educations.

These overgrown infants are the ones who will be controlling your towns, provinces, countries, and inter-governmental alliances. You will need to devise methods of dealing with them. Here is one such method devised by a free-thinking blogger:

I have my own moral code

I recognize that others have theirs

I eschew forcing anyone, but I’d be delighted to blow brains on the wall should those others engineer to impose their sets of assumptions or corollary paradigms on me

Don’t want to be locked up

I like to trade, where something I want less goes for something they want want less too, but each wants what the other holds, more

You will probably need to devise your own code, but it sometimes helps to think about the codes of others around you. Some places, nothing gets done without a corrupt greasing of the wheels. Sometimes things become more serious and out of control. HFTB-PFTW.

Overgrown infants will be government bureaucrats who determine whether your house can be built. They will be judges who decide your case, or members of the jury who decide your guilt or innocence. They will be prosecuting attorneys, senators, and the journalist who decides to take you down.

As the dysgenic Idiocracy takes firmer hold of your country and your hometown, consider what you will be facing in the steadily encroaching world of red tape and stupidity closing in around you.

Are parents truly so stupid that they do not understand what is being done to their little darlings? Certainly they understand what is happening to their bank accounts, but do they understand what their earnings are being converted to — in the lands of academic lobotomies?

My wife had an interviewee, while being grilled with problem solving type questions ask to take a minute to “call her mother” to ask mom what the answer should be. This girl was a recent college graduate.